Reason in a Fractious Society
Video of my keynote talk at Integrity 20’18 presented by Griffith University
Read
Tag: Politics & society
Why your rivals are smiling at you
No one succeeds online by screaming “read me everyone!” Instead, we all act as though we are simply being sociable, sharing our thoughts freely, almost as though we were being generous rather than self-serving. We retweet and share the posts of others, not only because we find them genuinely interesting, but also because we know that is what cooperatition needs: its the cooperative side of the competition for attention.
Read
Reparations for slavery are fair
A lot of societal inequality and injustice is inherited from those whose gains were to various degrees ill-earned. As a society we have barely begun to address this seriously.
Read
The ethics of driverless cars
It is culture, not biology, that makes the average French person value all lives more equally and the Japanese make that value depend on how we behave. And these values can in turn be shaped by the philosophical and theological ideas that hold sway.
Read
Our kinder politics
I suggest looking at three ways of thinking prominent in non-western philosophies that might alert us to aspects of our own that have been squeezed too much into the background and could benefit from being given more attention. Once we do that, we can recalibrate, putting more emphasis on the values that have been neglected and less on those that have come to carry too much weight. If that helps us to a more compassionate, less adversarial politics, all the better.
Read